Technology & engineering archive

EECS professor Laura Waller is working on computational imaging methods for quantitative phase microscopy, which can be applied in a variety of scientific and industrial settings. Her work is supported by the Bakar Fellows Program for young faculty whose work holds commercial promise.

A team led by Ronald Rael, UC Berkeley associate professor of architecture, is unveiling the first and largest powder-based 3-D-printed cement structure built to date. The pavilion, “Bloom,” demonstrates the architectural potential of 3-D printing, its creators say.

Nine UC Berkeley faculty members were awarded 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships to boost their early-career research. They are Naomi Ginsberg and Thomas Maimone in chemistry; Benjamin Handel in economics; Vivek Shende, Richard Bamler and Lin Lin in mathematics; Helen Bateup and Polina V. Lishko in neuroscience; and James Analytis in physics.

Bakar Fellow John Dueber, an assistant professor of bioengineering, is working to develop a sustainable indigo-dyeing process. The new technology has the potential to transform the Jeans (and related textile) dyeing industry from a polluting industry into a green one.

The brain’s speech area, named after 19th century French physician Pierre Paul Broca, shuts down when we talk out loud, according to a new study that challenges the long-held belief that “Broca’s area” governs all aspects of speech production.

EECS professor Ana Claudia Arias is creating new wearable electronics to allow easier and better MRI imaging of sick infants, among others. Her research is supported by the Bakar Fellows Program for young faculty whose work holds commercial promise.

Berkeley engineers frequently win awards for scientific achievements — but it’s not every day they win an Oscar. Last weekend, as a lead-up to the Oscar ceremony Feb. 22, EECS professor James O’Brien was awarded a technical achievement Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contribution to special effects.

Biomass conversion to electricity combined with new technologies for capturing and storing carbon, which should become viable within 35 years, could result in a carbon-negative power grid in the Western United States by 2050. That prediction comes from an analysis by UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen and grad student Daniel Sanchez of the Energy and Resources Group.

Jonathan Bray, professor of geotechnical engineering, and Clayton Radke, professor of chemical engineering, are among 67 new members and 12 foreign members elected to the National Academy of Engineering Thursday, Feb. 5.

UC Berkeley scientists have found the mechanism by which titanium, prized for its high strength-to-weight ratio and natural resistance to corrosion, becomes brittle with just a few extra atoms of oxygen. The discovery could potentially lead to more practical, cost-effective use of titanium in a broader range of applications, including vehicles, buildings and bridges.

Global food, global politics and Cal Day — just a sample from the menu of events at Berkeley this spring. This semester brings discussion of women in the world, an exhibit by legendary music photographer Jim Marshall, the National Parks centennial, and opera star Cecilia Bartoli. Berkeley’s Campanile rings in its 100th birthday with celebrations across campus.

New research moves the wonder material graphene a major step closer to knocking silicon off as the dominant workhorse of the electronics industry. While silicon is ubiquitous in semiconductors and integrated circuits, scientists have been eyeing graphene ­because of the ultrafast speed with which electrons can zip through the material.

California must expand access to energy information if it’s going to meet its goal of transforming energy use away from petroleum and toward renewable sources, according to a new report from the UC Climate Change and Business Research Initiative.

SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s incubator for businesses springing from the work of young, creative researchers, has been around for just two years, and already five young people on two teams it has sponsored have landed spots on Forbes magazine’s latest “30 Under 30” list. A sixth made last year’s list.

A tiny sliver of plutonium safely stored on the UC Berkeley campus is making news for its connection to a momentous point in history. Nuclear scientists have recently determined with near certainty that the plutonium was created by a team led by the late UC Berkeley chemist Glenn Seaborg as part of the Manhattan Project.

In advance of the inaugural symposium Jan. 15-16 of the new Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute, Kavli ENSI director Paul Alivisatos joins Paul McEuen, director of the Kavli institute at Cornell, and Nai-Chang Yeh, director of the Kavli institute at Caltech, to discuss the future of nanoscience.

From Gravity to The Theory of Everything, Hollywood depictions of science and scientists are helping make the STEM fields more mainstream, even if scientific accuracy sometimes gets short shrift, writes Berkeley undergrad Alison Ong.

Two and a half million years ago, our hominin ancestors in the African savanna crafted rocks into shards that could slice apart a dead gazelle, zebra or other game animal. Over the next 700,000 years, this butchering technology spread throughout the continent and, it turns out, came to be a major evolutionary force, according to new research that combines the tools of psychology, evolutionary biology and archaeology.

Listening to an academic lecture on flood prediction while a fifth of Pakistan was flooded by monsoon rains sparked a humanitarian drive in Syed Imran Ali’s studies in safe water delivery. Now he’s a postdoc at Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, pursuing his vision of development engineering, which means helping bring safe water to people in ways that involve them and take into account their actual needs and realities.

If you’re checking your work email in the wee hours, is that a sign of dedication or a symptom of inefficiency? Tania Lombrozo, an associate professor of psychology, explores the allure of constant connection, and makes a resolution for 2015.

UC Berkeley engineering students joined civil engineering professor Raja Sengupta at the first-ever Drone Expo in Los Angeles on Saturday, demonstrating their “unmanned autonomous vehicles” to a crowd of some 4,000 hobbyists and enthusiasts.

A new study led by engineers at UC Berkeley and CITRIS describes the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance.” The work describes a unique reaction of electrical charge to applied voltage in a ferroelectric material that could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, chemical engineer Jay Keasling and chemist Richard Mathies were among 170 people named fellows of the National Academy of Inventors. The organization honors innovators who have file patents in the United States.

An international research team studying the mortar used to build such Roman architectural marvels as the Pantheon, Trajan’s Markets and the Colosseum has found a secret to the material’s resilience. Led by scientists at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, the team found that as the mortar cures, it forms a crystalline binding hydrate that prevents microcracks from propagating.

Attosecond lasers provide the shortest light pulses yet, allowing observation of nature’s most short-lived events. Berkeley researchers have used these lasers for the first time to take snapshots of electrons jumping from silicon atoms into the conduction band of a semiconductor, the key event behind the transistor.

UC Berkeley researchers have created a pulse oximeter, commonly used to measure heart rate and blood oxygen levels, using all organic materials instead of silicon. The advance could lead to cheap, flexible sensors that could be used like a Band-Aid.